The Sphinx
by Proserpine in the Underworld
Summary: Who is the Sphinx that watches time pass and guards the threshold?


I see many children each day. Small girls and boys, and taller ones too, gargirls and bores, and pearls and toys. They run and walk, they run off at their round red mouths and flip long golden and black and brown hairs. They jump, or climb, or step up, step down, trip and sometimes they fall. They go out when it's light, and come back when it's dark. Or sometimes the other way around, but I don't, wouldn't tell, oh no. They make me smile, though, the lovers and the fighters, and the silent ones, the laughing ones, and the ones dying or the ones reborn. All of them go in out, in out, so much movement, so much life in their warm flesh bodies, all that sweet exquisite pain of theirs and all that electricity. I swing backwards and forwards with them, they inside or outside, and I the threshold, the barrier, the sphinx whose riddle they must answer. And if they know it not, well, so long to them, may they retreat to regions less golden and noble. For that is how it is inside, I know it. I have often imagined how the common room must look. Gilded and proud, with so many children inside, who I hear murmuring warmly, like a swarm of golden bees, as I keep vigil. 

Now look--the sun rises, the castle wakes, everywhere there is the groaning of dissidents and the movement of cloth and the rustling of scrolls and from downstairs come the smells of coffee and bacon. I can hear the far-off hooting of downy owls with piercing yellow eyes, and the sun slanting through the windows warms the cold stones. It is Monday, I believe, because they are leaving for breakfast at seven, rather than at ten as they have for the past two days. Yes, there they all go. I face the other way and hear their footsteps thud away. I swing back slowly, and someone small slips out just in time, and runs down the hall alone, ponytail bouncing like a red balloon. I sigh. I am contented, for my brood is off at breakfast now, and off to learning and stretching their unwilling minds. The magic they give off will begin to drift up to me in an hour or so, invisible but tangible, heady or soothing.

The morning drifts on. A perfect pearl first-year with tears on her face and shame in her voice comes in. Then a rounded fifth-year boy—Neville, I think—a bore, but he is kind, comes in and out again. Then the fiery twins, teasing and joking with their long arms wrapped around each other's waist. A seventh-year toy, tall, with a straight nose and straight dark eyes who comes in quietly. He is pale and empty, with a smooth calm mask of maturity. I remember him when he was a skinny blushing thirteen year old with his arms around his skinny thirteen year old girlfriend, and soon he will leave, his straight back and his straight dark hair going down that hallway for the last time. And perhaps I will not even see, for I shall be facing the other way.

Long shadows stretch across the floor, and my mind sways and wanders, through a seething stream of faces, pouring through the years that are at once long and short. I swing backwards and forwards, the sound of pounding feet fills my ears like the roar of the sea, and this sea is a million faces, smiling and crying and laughing and scowling at me, a blur of change that stretches behind me for miles and miles. 

Now they come back, as night falls, they trickle back in, and slowly the dormitory fills and I feel it begin to glow at my back. Night fills the corridor, cold and thin, but I sit against a warm hive of living bodies that fills my heart and head. Someone comes down the corridor now, a slender boy with luminous white hair. He stops by my portrait. He is waiting. Soon another boy comes out, the famous one, Harry. As they walk away they begin exchanging kisses like blows. 

And soon the dawn breaks. It is Tuesday, I believe, because yesterday was Monday. Harry returns silently, glowing in the early light…. the sun rises, the castle wakes, everywhere there is the groaning of dissidents and the movement of cloth and the rustling of scrolls and from downstairs come the smells of coffee and bacon…


End file.
